The application of artificial-intelligence-(AI)-based methods within the context of complex systems poses new challenges within the product life cycle. The process model for AI systems engineering, PAISE®, addresses these challenges by combining approaches from the disciplines of systems engineering, software development and data science. The general approach builds on a component-wise development of the overall system including an AI component. This allows domain specific development processes to be parallelized. At the same time, component dependencies are tested within interdisciplinary checkpoints, thus resulting in a refinement of component specifications.

In the field of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), there is a large number of machine learning methods, and their intrinsic hyper-parameters are hugely varied. Since no agreed-on datasets for CPS exist, developers of new algorithms are forced to define their own benchmarks. This leads to a large number of algorithms each claiming benefits over other approaches but lacking a fair comparison. To tackle this problem, this paper defines a novel model for a generation process of data, similar to that found in CPS. The model is based on well-understood system theory and allows many datasets with different characteristics in terms of complexity to be generated. The data will pave the way for a comparison of selected machine learning methods in the exemplary field of unsupervised learning. Based on the synthetic CPS data, the data generation process is evaluated by analyzing the performance of the methods of the Self-Organizing Map, One-Class Support Vector Machine and Long Short-Term Memory Neural Net in anomaly detection.